It’s been four summers now, and we’re into the fifth winter. People keep telling me–insisting, really–that the weather has never quite been this way, but frankly I’m starting to wonder. It’s snowing again: like yesterday, single flakes fall all morning and then suddenly, just before noon, there’s snow. I have places to go, but I don’t really have to go anywhere, so I’ve been sipping tea, practicing Japanese pronouns, and watching the bundled-up people skid by my window.
Nick calls in the afternoons to ask about the roads, but on that score he really doesn’t trust me any more than he trusts the French. Apparently if you didn’t spend your entire childhood in The Part of New England That Counts, you’ll never really understand the complex relationship between roads and snow.
“They don’t know how to drive in it,” he huffs. “They don’t even know to put salt down.”
They do, I assure him, but his denials get increasingly strident until a salt truck passes by a few feet from us, spraying liberally.
“That’s probably the town’s one truck,” he informs me sagely, and I won’t argue. It could be true.
I’m homesick, anyway, busy counting down the days until tinsel and hot cider and people who know how to drive in snow. That the kind of winter I remember has come to France makes me smile, half-close my eyes, imagine what will be waiting under the tree.